International Lecture: Flores & Prats - The Discipline of the Existing

KADK are very pleased to be able to invite everyone to the open public lecture, The Discipline of the Existing by the Spanish architectural office Flores & Prats in the series of lectures: The Ordinary Daylight.

The lecture will focus on the design process of Sala Beckett in Barcelona, a renovation of an old workers’ cooperative into a new theatre and drama centre, a place dedicated to promote new drama stories and to put them on stage for the first time. The building, abandoned for more than 30 years, interested us not to restore it but rather to take the ruin forward and make it participant, with its unfinished character of superimposed periods, in a new reality that would continue to update on this foundation. 

About Flores & Prats
Flores & Prats is an architectural office dedicated to the confrontation of theory and academic practice with design and construction activity. After their experience at Enric Miralles' studio, Ricardo Flores and Eva Prats develop a career where research is always linked to the responsibility to make and build. They have worked in rehabilitation of old structures for new occupations, in the design of public spaces with neighbour’s participation, as well as in social housing and their capacity to create community. But they have also experimented with the use of film to document architecture, or with menus of edible architecture developed for exhibitions of their work in Barcelona and Copenhagen.

The work of Flores & Prats obtained among others the Grand Award in Architecture at the Royal Academy of Arts of London for their Mills Museum, the City of Barcelona Award and the Special Mention at the Spanish National Awards for the Sala Beckett International Drama Centre and the City of Palma Award for the Cultural Centre Casal Balaguer. They have been nominated for the Mies van der Rohe Awards 2005, 2015 and 2016, and exhibited at La Biennale di Venezia in 2012, 2014, 2016 and 2018. At the last edition of La Biennale they had a double participation: at the main curator’s exhibition in Le Corderie del’Arsenale, and to build a chapel for the first Pavilion of the Holy See in San Giorgio Maggiore Island.

Eva and Ricardo are professors of Design Studio at the School of Architecture of Barcelona, and since 2019 Guest Professors in ETH Zurich. Eva is also Professor of Architecture at the RMIT Melbourne. They have directed workshops in universities of the United States, South America, Europe and Australia.

In 2015, the Mexican Editorial Arquine published the first monograph book on their work, Thought by Hand, and in 2017 the new magazine Archives dedicated its first issue to the work of this office.

About the series of lectures: The ordinary daylight 
The lecture is a part of the series of lectures title, The ordinary daylight and focuses on architects that work consciously and qualitatively with the effects and appearances of daylight in architecture.

The series of lectures has included:

• Light is a Moving Material by the Japanese architect Hiroshi Sambuichi
• Sverre Fehn:  Structure in Search of its Light by the Norwegian architect and author Per Olaf Fjeld
• Informal Delight by the Chile-based practice Pezo von Ellrichshausen 
• ..Where the Light Gets In, Intentions, Realities, Paradoxes, by the Swedish architect Johan Celsing
• A lightness of touch, by the English architect, Stephen Bates from Sergison & Bates Architects
• Reflections on light, by the English architect and professor Dean Hawkes
• The lectures are organized by the The Light Lab at KADK and is kindly supported by VELUX Denmark.